Theoretical researches in general relativity and observational data from galactic astronomy combine in this volume in contributions to one of the oldest questions of natural philosophy: Is the structure of the physical world more adequately described by a continuous or a discrete mode of representation? Since the days of the Pythagoreans, this question has surfaced from time to time in various guises in science as well as in philosophy. One of the most bitterly contested and illuminating controversies between the continuous and the discrete viewpoints is to be found in the wave versus corpuscular description of optical phenom enae. This controversy was not resolved to the satisfaction of most of its protaganists until the development of the quantum theory. However, several obscurities that still becloud the question suggest that some deeper formulation may be necessary before more satisfactory answers can be given 1. The firm establishment of the validity of quantized structure and discrete energy distributions on the atomic scale following the ideas of Max Planck, together with the apparent absence of quan tization effect in astronomical and cosmic structures leaves uncertainties concerning the role played by the scale of the observer in perceiving or not perceiving discrete distributions. Some of the metaphysical inter pretations and implications of the quantum mechanics that have been made in recent years 2 would be subject to revision if the existence of discretized descriptions were to be established in astronomical and cosmic structures.

The Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore hosted a research program on ?Nanoscale Material Interfaces: Experiment, Theory and Simulation'' from November 2004 to January 2005. As part of the program, tutorials for graduate students and junior researchers were given by leading experts in the field.This invaluable volume collects the expanded lecture notes of four of those self-contained tutorials. The topics covered include dynamics in different models of domain coarsening and coagulation and their mathematical analysis in material sciences; a mathematical and computational study for quantized vortices in the celebrated Ginzburg?Landau models of superconductivity and the mean field Gross?Pitaevskii equations of superfluidity; the nonlinear Schr”dinger equation and applications in Bose?Einstein condensation and plasma physics as well as their efficient and accurate computation; and finally, an introduction to constitutive modeling of macromolecular fluids within the framework of the kinetic theory.This volume serves to inspire graduate students and researchers who will embark upon original research work in these fields.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Theoretic Foundations of Computer Vision, held as a Dagstuhl Seminar in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in June/July 2011. The 19 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected after a blind peer-review process. The topic of this Workshop was Outdoor and Large-Scale Real-World Scene Analysis, which covers all aspects, applications and open problems regarding the performance or design of computer vision algorithms capable of working in outdoor setups and/or large-scale environments. Developing these methods is important for driver assistance, city modeling and reconstruction, virtual tourism, telepresence, and motion capture.

The two volume set LNAI 6703 and LNAI 6704 constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems, IEA/AIE 2011, held in Syracuse, NY, USA, in June/July 2011. The total of 92 papers selected for the proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 206 submissions. The papers cover a wide number of topics including feature extraction, discretization, clustering, classification, diagnosis, data refinement, neural networks, genetic algorithms, learning classifier systems, Bayesian and probabilistic methods, image processing, robotics, navigation, optimization, scheduling, routing, game theory and agents, cognition, emotion, and beliefs.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Large-Scale Scientific Computations, LSSC 2005, held in Sozopol, Bulgaria in June 2005. The 75 revised full papers presented together with five invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections.

This wide-ranging book introduces information as a key concept not only in physics, from quantum mechanics to thermodynamics, but also in the neighboring sciences and in the humanities. The central part analyzes dynamical processes as manifestations of information flows between microscopic and macroscopic scales and between systems and their environment. Quantum mechanics is interpreted as a reconstruction of mechanics based on fundamental limitations of information processing on the smallest scales. These become particularly manifest in quantum chaos and in quantum computing. Covering subjects such as causality, prediction, undecidability, chaos, and quantum randomness, the book also provides an information-theoretical view of predictability. More than 180 illustrations visualize the concepts and arguments. The book takes inspiration from the author's graduate-level topical lecture but is also well suited for undergraduate studies and is a valuable resource for researchers and professionals.